Typical Google: "We've got this fantastic new technology, and everyone should use it, even though it's still half-finished and not even close to ready for prime time and we won't offer any guarantees about the complete spec or future support!"

Not only is it advantageous for the web servers to send fewer bytes, but it's also beneficial for the user with faster browsing and data caps, if applicable. Of course, adoption is always a huge hurdle by itself. Assuming there's no licensing cost, you still have to tackle implementation costs and marketing.

So, why is it exactly that people need to copy image urls (rather than links to the post) or save images to disk? Simple answer: to share it with people the owner did not intend to share it with.

Sorry folks, you have no sympathy from me. This is something that should be actively discouraged, regardless of WebP.

Well since these images are just blobs in some data store anyway, ideally facebook would ignore the file extension and just serve the best image for that browser. To determine that, however, you really need the Accept header telling you what you can send them. You can assume, based on the user agent string, but it can be risky.

The download thing is a separate issue and harder to fix. Eventually image programs will be able to open the format, but for now facebook should just make the "Download" link actually visible, instead of hidden under the "Options" menu. Hitting it will always download the jpg version of the file.

That xkcd doesn't apply well to codecs, unless you want to explain why, say, work on h265 or vp9 is a bad thing and should halt immediately.

This same stuff happened when png support was added, everyone has just forgotten. The only people that seem to remember are those that were really attached to APNG and its brethren, and so are doubly mad about webp.

Facebook stores many billions of images, and to reduce bandwidth and storage costs, it recompresses the images that people upload. The practice lowers image quality, but this should usually be good enough for the purposes of social networking users. Google's comparisons between JPEG, the standard format used for photographic images, and WebP suggest that WebP offers a 25 to 34 percent reduction in file size for the same overall picture quality. Such savings would obviously be advantageous to Facebook.

Offering webp with a jpg fallback - which will be the only solution for the foreseeable future, might save a bit of bandwith, but it'll increase storage because you'll need to store both versions.As of 2009, adding webp versions - assuming ~30% smaller files, would require about a terabyte of additional storage. Of course they could just generate them on demand, and we could assume older pictures are unlikely to be viewed by webp enabled browsers, but as of 2009 they were adding 25TB of images every week.

Facebook might have done the calculations and decided the bandwith savings are worth the increased storage demands. Or maybe they're just pushing for a (in their view) better standard. Or something else. But they sure as hell aren't saving on storage.

That xkcd doesn't apply well to codecs, unless you want to explain why, say, work on h265 or vp9 is a bad thing and should halt immediately.

This same stuff happened when png support was added, everyone has just forgotten. The only people that seem to remember are those that were really attached to APNG and its brethren, and so are doubly mad about webp.

Wasn't there also FUD associated with jpg at the time?

And didn't png provide features unavailable in gif or jpg?

I'm suggesting that png provided value to the web beyond "smaller file sizes" which allowed it to gain acceptance more quickly.

That xkcd doesn't apply well to codecs, unless you want to explain why, say, work on h265 or vp9 is a bad thing and should halt immediately.

This same stuff happened when png support was added, everyone has just forgotten. The only people that seem to remember are those that were really attached to APNG and its brethren, and so are doubly mad about webp.

Wasn't there also FUD associated with jpg at the time?

And didn't png provide features unavailable in gif or jpg?

I'm suggesting that png provided value to the web beyond "smaller file sizes" which allowed it to gain acceptance more quickly.

Also, the whole ecosystem was a whole lot smaller then.

Well there are other benefits, like lossy compression with full alpha, but bandwidth is a big deal. Developers get upset when their favorite javascript libraries pack on a few more kilobytes. Mobile browser already take a long time to load sites for most of the world.

There were also many arguments about png back in the 90s, one of the biggest being that it offered little over gif and only a free-tard would want it and only because it wasn't patent encumbered. Luckily the slow-and-steady crowd kept on that.

The ecosystem was smaller then, and I'm not claiming that webp is some god format that will overcome all, I'm just saying the "let's make a new standard" criticism is just a knee-jerk reaction without much thought behind it. Most codecs are differentiated by their feature set and how they implement those features, because codecs are entirely about tradeoffs. They usually aren't a standard encompassing the same old thing, but now with a whole new API to support (and the fact that Facebook is even considering using the format is a clear sign of that).

That xkcd doesn't apply well to codecs, unless you want to explain why, say, work on h265 or vp9 is a bad thing and should halt immediately.

This same stuff happened when png support was added, everyone has just forgotten. The only people that seem to remember are those that were really attached to APNG and its brethren, and so are doubly mad about webp.

Wasn't there also FUD associated with jpg at the time?

I don't remember any. The main problem with jpg way back when was that it was noticeably slower to decode and display than gif or the other common image formats of the time, and since most people didn't have any better than VGA graphics, the improved image quality over gif wasn't really noticeable.

That xkcd doesn't apply well to codecs, unless you want to explain why, say, work on h265 or vp9 is a bad thing and should halt immediately.

This same stuff happened when png support was added, everyone has just forgotten. The only people that seem to remember are those that were really attached to APNG and its brethren, and so are doubly mad about webp.

Wasn't there also FUD associated with jpg at the time?

I don't remember any. The main problem with jpg way back when was that it was noticeably slower to decode and display than gif or the other common image formats of the time, and since most people didn't have any better than VGA graphics, the improved image quality over gif wasn't really noticeable.

Why not Google make this matter easier for every browsers is to offer a plug-in that support this WebP instead of built-in to their supporting browsers? When the user open up a WebP format it should reads "You need to download this plug-in to view the images, and a URL link to a Google site for the download files"? Facebook must has this plug-in. I don't see the problem of this.

Nothing really interesting here... any change is a pain in the ass and will cause problems.

The question is, does WebP have enough improvements over jpg to justify the pain? I'd never heard of WebP until now... sounds interesting.

Has anyone done an in-depth analysis? I remember a test of JPEG2000 found that, while the image sizes are smaller, the increased CPU processing required to render the image made using it a bad idea compared to just plain old JPEG.

I wonder how WebP compares to JPG and PNG in those respects? There's a lot more to an image format than just the filesize and quality.

I really hope this format, or one like it, can take off. The web has been sadly lacking a format that supports both lossy compression+transparency for too long. We're comming into an era of html5 and web-gl games and having lossy+transparency is important.

Jpeg-XR is often forgotten these days but is another decent condender to fill in this demand. It lags behind Web-P in regards to lossy compression quality, but has neat advantages such as having very broad colour range support (web-p only supports 8-bit YUV) and being fully ISO standardised. Microsoft even released a new BSD licenced library for it less than a month ago.

In any case, i hope one of them eventually catches on if only for the new features like lossy+transparency.

I looked for a good comparison between JPEG-XR and WebP but haven't found anything substantive. Can anyone shed some light on that? Reading the specs, it seems JPEG-XR is a pretty interesting format and it's an ISO approved format. So if you can share pros and cons of one versus the other it would great.

Assuming WebP is roughly 30% more efficient than jpeg, has full alpha channel support and supports animation all baked right in to the same format it is (from a technical perspective) a clearly valuable standard - somebody's gotta implement it first though (which chrome has done for obvious reasons) and so long as everybody else is following suit I think we're in good shape.

Doesn't sound well-supported enough to be turning it on for a major website like facebook yet though.